Financial Technology and Efficiency of Enterprise Investment an Empirical Study Based on China's Listed Companies

Using the panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2019, we examine the impact of financial technology (FinTech) development on enterprise investment efficiency. In addition, we construct a regional FinTech development index on the basis of the number of FinTech companies in prefecture-level cities. We find that FinTech significantly improves the efficiency of enterprise investment. The main contribution of the paper is that the findings demonstrate that FinTech plays an important role in relieving information asymmetry of capital markets. Decreasing financing constraint of enterprises and weakening agency conflict are the mechanisms through which FinTech improves the efficiency of enterprise investment. In particular, we adopt a series of robustness tests, such as instrumental variables and system GMM estimates, which confirm the causal effect. We also find that the impact of FinTech on improving investment efficiency of enterprises is prominent in areas with low banking competition and slow development of non-state-owned economy. We believe that FinTech shall continue to promote deep integration between technology and the financial field in the key stage of China’s economic structured transformation and updating. Moreover, it will accelerate the updating of commercial banks through technological advantages, thus improving the ability of financial service real economy